Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2024-09-04/Serendipity
What it's like to be Wikimedian of the Year
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I attended my first Wikimania this year in Katowice, Poland. I thought about applying for a scholarship when the process was open, but ultimately decided against it. I figured that attending WikiConference North America was enough for one year; obviously, I changed my mind once I was chosen as the Wikimedian of the Year. I had never been outside of North America before this event, so this experience was a lot of firsts for me. If I had told younger me that my first trip to Europe would be in Poland, she would have been very confused.
In late May, I received an email telling me that I was one of the five people shortlisted for the award. I tried not to think about it too much: I didn't think I'd actually be the winner and that one of the other four editors would be chosen. I didn't consider my accomplishments to be even remotely comparable to those of Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight or Emily Temple-Wood, so why would it be me? I was told to expect a response within three weeks, but it ended up taking longer than that (apparently, there were unexpected challenges internally, and I was told it wasn't my fault). I found out that it was actually me on July 4, which gave me about a month to come to terms with my upcoming fame. I was excited for the most part, but I was also terrified; sometimes it felt like a countdown of doom, where my life would never be normal again.
August 6 – Tuesday
This was a pre-conference culture crawl day, so there were no sessions to attend. Katowice is six hours ahead of Niagara Falls, where I live, so I was also trying to recover from jet lag. I didn't really see much of the city other than getting a super secret tour of the venue and hanging out with some staff members in the attached café. We had some interesting conversations, though: I found out that the Wikimedia Foundation owns their data centres for privacy reasons, that this practice is incredibly expensive, and that it's unusual for tech companies to do this. A new data centre was recently built in Brazil, and this took a lot of work: you can read about it here. I was also told that the codebase for MediaWiki is incredibly old: as a result, this presents unique challenges and a lot of things are "hacks on top of hacks". I was encouraged to attend a session where this topic was featured, which can be watched here. Unfortunately, I did not manage to do so.
August 7 – Wednesday
I had breakfast in the hotel lobby and talked to New Zealand user Giantflightlessbirds, who told me about some interesting work he does as a Wikipedian at Large (an alternative name for a Wikipedian in Residence) in his home-country. I also talked to a few other Wikimedians... but did not get their usernames. Finally, I showed one young woman my knitting and we took a selfie together.
Sessions
- I attended the orientation from 9:00 to 9:45 am. It was mostly some background on how the 2024 Wikimania conference was moved from Kraków to Katowice (including some friendly banter about how they were going to gaslight us with the slides and merchandise), some anecdotes about Polish cuisine and culture (did you know that pierogies can have a blueberry filling?), to follow the friendly space policies (essentially, don't be a jerk), and to exercise caution regarding alcoholic beverages.
- I attended the Volunteer Supporter's Network session from 10:00 to 10:25 am. I noted that these resources were only offered to affiliates, so at the end of the session, I asked someone from the audience about my desire to know more about the type of activities affiliates participate in, since I think this process can be somewhat confusing from the outside looking in. However, I have not heard back yet.
- I attended the blocking and temporary accounts sessions by Trust and Safety, and I found them incredibly informative. The latter session ran into unexpected challenges when the pre-recorded video lost audio, but I think Dreamy Jazz did a good job stepping in and making the best of it.
Opening ceremony
Preparation for the opening ceremony started at 1 pm. I was one of two recipients who misunderstood that I was supposed to have lunch before meeting Jimmy Wales; luckily, Vermont saved the day by finding us meals and beverages. Apart from that, my introduction to Wales and the rest of the recipients went smoothly. We sat next to each other in one big circle and shared who we are and which category we were chosen for. Then, we rehearsed the ceremony itself.
After the rehearsal finished, I spent time with a bunch of friends behind a staircase (we had a table and it's way less gloomy than it sounds). Some plans were made for after the opening ceremony, because "it's not like any of us will have anything to do". It was incredibly difficult to keep a straight face and not give the secret away at that point. When we all sat down at a table in the room for the opening ceremony, at 5 pm, my heart was pounding, but I tried my best to remain calm and just act like everything was normal, and I think I did a good job acting the part. On the inside, I felt like I was experiencing something akin to an adrenaline rush: it's difficult to explain precisely what I was feeling, but it was incredibly intense. I was sitting next to Seddon, and he was determined to update all the award recipients as they were announced. However, he had no idea that I was going to be one of them, and his laptop died, so he switched to his tablet to edit through the app when my time came. It was oddly fitting, given that I'm known for mobile editing... The secret was out once Natalia started describing me; Seddon suddenly looked up from his tablet and literally blurted out, "It's you!" We shared a knowing look: sure enough, it was me. My name was announced, the lights that gave everyone a headache went crazy, and I forced myself to walk onto the stage.
I admit I have very limited experience with public speaking: I had never been on a stage before, and I had a thousand people watching me for the first time in my life. I could literally feel my legs shake, and I spent a lot of my mental effort just trying to stay still and not fall. I was told by a few people afterwards that I did look a little nervous, but the situation didn't look as dire as it felt. If you wish to watch it, you can do so here. In retrospect, I'd empty my pockets beforehand (my wallet and passport are bulky)... I would also have spoken more slowly, deliberately, and with less filler words. After the ceremony ended, I mingled with the other conference participants, because I'm a social butterfly. A bunch of people congratulated me and asked for a selfie, and one person even asked me to sign their copy of All the Knowledge in the World.
August 8 – Thursday
Sessions
- I attended the Opening the Academia keynote session from 9:00 to 9:55 am. It was a panel with four participants, and I listened to what the speakers had to say about their experiences; I particularly agreed with the argument that academic publishing should be more open access than it currently is. Later on, I heard something that stood out to me: "If you're a scholar and you do not ask your students to write Wikipedia articles as a form of submitting your essay for a grade, you're a loser. You're a massive loser." This comment concerned me for multiple reasons: one question posed in editor reflections is about WikiEd, with numerous people having used this space to share that they have cleaned up after student editors and that they found this experience frustrating. I don't think this conclusion is surprising to anyone who has read an WP:ANI thread where a WikiEd class has gone wrong. So hearing someone say, "If you do this, Wikipedia editors will oftentimes check to see if it's plagiarized or not, they will make comments, they will edit it for you", and, "If from a class of thirty people... five articles remain, it's zero versus five", it came across as a somewhat reckless mentality to have. I expressed these concerns when questions and comments were opened up to members of the audience:
"You mentioned you were very pro-student editing and how you think everyone should do it, right? Obviously, I'm cool with young people editing, because I'm 21 and if I was against that, I wouldn't be editing at all. But I think maybe there are more factors to consider than just seeing if some articles stay. From the newcomer's perspective, you don't want to be setting people up to fail. Then, from the community outreach perspective, [...] yes, people will clean up after the people who are doing things that they aren't supposed to be, but it kind of diminishes the volunteer morale a bit? [If] they're constantly flooded with content that they need to clean up, then it can be a bit of a vicious cycle where they're less welcoming to student editors. So, I was just wondering if you've ever considered that, and if you had any thoughts on how you might want to mitigate factors like that?"
- In response, they said:
"I think it's a very good argument that you're making, but there's two things that I wanted to add to that. First of all, editors are already flooded with bad quality edits. [I interrupted them to clarify that my concerns were related to the scale in which these issues can arise. Then they said:] I would still argue that the average quality of professor-supervised class editing will be higher than the average quality of a newcomer edit. Mainly because students have access to all those journal libraries and are, by design, probably the top 1% of knowledge-privileged people. By design, their edits will most likely not be horrible, although probably not great, either. Second, I think the problem you're raising is super important, that we do not discourage people by hanging them out to dry, go out and edit Wikipedia and of course, prepare them. I think you're very right that, first of all, we need to let people know what the rules are, maybe get them familiar with the format, but isn't that true of academic writing in general? You do not ask people to start writing journals."
- In retrospect, I wouldn't have interrupted them as they were speaking, as I did a few times in that exchange: I think I was treating it like a conversation, but in this context, it comes across as somewhat rude. If I meet him again someday, I'd likely apologize for that. Afterwards, I had a brief conversation with other audience members in the hallway, where I discussed how I think Wikipedia works best when someone's heart is in it, and not because they're doing it for a grade. I mentioned another editor I had met at a Toronto meetup, who has a Wikipedia club at their university: I brought this up as an example of how one can mitigate the potential disadvantages of large scale student editing without getting rid of the advantages, such as new editors and access to university resources.
- I attended this session about human rights from 10:00 to 10:55 am: it was not uploaded on YouTube, but the slides are available here. It was a bit odd to hear about general internet safety after outing myself to more than a thousand people the night before, but I think it was interesting, nonetheless. Here are some key takeaways: women are more likely to be harassed online, people have gone to jail for editing Wikipedia, and it's important to respond quickly to safety concerns. I asked a question about how they determine the "realness" of a threat, and it turned out that it depends a lot on the context of the specific situation. Do they live in a country with a good human rights record? Does the project itself, or the person, see the threat as concerning? Sometimes the foundation does not get involved because they don't want to do any harm (e.g. if they make a public statement, they might put the victim's family in danger). There was some audience participation about the general nature of how some editors are more open about their identities than others, and how it's very much a personal choice that we should not judge others for.
- I attended the Information Integrity during Elections session from 11 am to 11:55 am. One key takeaway was that disinformation on Wikipedia looks different from how it would on a social media site (for example, targeted ads cannot be bought), but Wikipedia's increased visibility raises the motivation for bad actors. If a government fails to censor its opponents, they usually try to discredit the information source and threaten people: at the start of election cycles, sometimes people will contact political parties directly to remind them of the rules. When there's political violence, chapters and admins collaborate in private channels. Trust and Safety performs investigations and has a disinformation team. I learned that the Anti-disinformation Repository is a resource that exists. I also learned that occasionally the foundation does policy advocacy when it has implications for Wikimedia projects. An example was a Texas law, which would later become the subject of a Supreme Court case, that would make it possible to construe reverting content from an unreliable source as political speech. Other examples given were surveillance reform advocacy and Section 230 protections.
- I attended the Frontlines of Truth and Learn from each other with linked data sessions to fulfill my duties as a volunteer. Anyone who receives a scholarship to attend Wikimania is required to do this; I had to send a few emails to get this rearranged a few times, though. The first time I was chosen to do video editing (which I have no idea how to do), while the second time I was chosen to take notes for a session that was being presented in Spanish (a language I do not understand). I tried my best to take notes during these two sessions for the Etherpad, but I had no idea how that was supposed to work, and it stressed me out a little. The latter session was aimed towards a very technically minded audience, so I asked the speaker a bunch of questions during a break, just to make sure I was not misrepresenting what was being said.
- I attended the Fireside Chat with the Wikimedia Foundation Executives from 5 to 5:55 pm. There was a demo of Edit Check, which was incredibly exciting to see! The gist is that this feature will encourage editors to cite a source before adding content, or explain why they do not want to do so. It'd be a game changer. Apart from that, there was some discussion about how the foundation is concerned about the future of search engine traffic and keeping younger editors engaged. The time for questions was extended to allow me to ask one:
"[How did] you [come] to the conclusion that there are less younger editors that are interested in contributing? I think I actually had a conversation with Selena about this briefly at WikiConference North America, [where] I talked a bit about how I know lots of people my age that edit. [Obviously,] anecdotal experience isn't everything, but I assume you have pretty good reasons for coming to that conclusion?"
- In response, Selena Deckelmann said:
"I think there's editing and there's readers, so I can talk about the editing piece of it. With editors, it's complex. There are things that have shifted over time, and I actually have this really promising report the Community Metrics team put together, that says we're starting to see a rise in younger editors overall. That doesn't [necessarily] translate to functionaries, but I don't have as good data on [them] overall. They're a crucial population of people that make the whole system work, so for me there's data that shows that younger editors are kind of turning in a different direction, and if you dig in and look at each region, you start to see different stories. So it's quite a complex picture. Overall, I would say I get a lot of feedback from the administrators, in particular, that they're just seeing their numbers drop, that we're not getting enough new people into that system, so those are the factors and data that I have about admins and I'm really interested in more."
Conversations
- I had breakfast, and then arrived at the conference venue absurdly early (like 7 am). I had trouble sleeping after the intensity of the previous night, and I woke up around 4 am. I had a conversation with Ocaasi, as I talked a bit about my personal life and my ambitions, and we discussed how he wants more experienced Wikimedians to be a part of Residence programs. We also discussed how he does a lot of work guiding newbies, noting that when they don't make mistakes, they're often accused of being sockpuppets. He stated that I'm good at "constructive dissent": I'd never heard that phrase before, but I think it describes me well.
- During the election disinformation session, I had a whispered conversation with Shikeishu, who is an active editor on Wikidata. They showed me some interesting things, like Wikidata query, their community portal and project chat.
- At lunch, I had a conversation with Tohaomg: I told him about my goal to understand affiliates and what they do a bit more. He was willing to talk about what Wikimedia Ukraine does, being a board member of the organization since February 2021. He said that a lot of what they do when interacting with the public is correcting common misconceptions (an example being that projects don't operate like a business and there are no clearly defined hierarchies). We talked a lot about how the Russian invasion of Ukraine impacted daily life and in turn, Wikimedia Ukraine itself: a lot of Wikipedians either died, were conscripted, or moved to Poland, so the organization asked for help from other projects to help keep up with the maintenance of the Ukrainian Wikipedia, while assigning temporary admin rights to volunteers who were interested. However, most people had other priorities than editing Wikipedia, and even if they wanted to, power outages were common. There were also other practical issues, like how most European keyboards do not support typing in Ukrainian, and highly skilled workers having to take lower-paying jobs because their qualifications were not transferable to other countries. Other concerns were Russian disinformation and being contacted by Ukrainian government officials (he said that sometimes people will ask how to add an image, or that they don't like that certain content exists, in which case they are told that they would be reverted if they tried to remove it, and that Wikimedia Ukraine cannot control what's on the Ukranian Wikipedia). I was somewhat shocked, because it must be really intimidating to receive a phone call from government officials out of the blue like that. What's more, Ukraine does not have freedom of panorama, and that impacts what images are allowed to be uploaded to Commons: Tohaomg said that the organization had tried to get members of the national parliament to recognize why changing these rules would be useful, but it took so long that other people got elected, and so they would have to start over if they tried again. Then the war happened, so obviously politicians have different priorities. Still, Wikimedia Ukraine supports local contests to improve articles and add photos, while also partnering with other affiliates to do something called CEE Spring, which involves a lot of cross-project collaboration. For example, Polish Wikipedians will write content about Ukraine, and vice versa. Wikimedia Ukraine also does outreach work with libraries and museums. Finally, they have monthly awards where the most active editor and newbie win... a can of condensed milk. If you're as confused as I am, it's a play on words in Ukrainian, where the phrasing for "condensed milk" and "milk you don't pay for" is similar. They also support an annual event called Wikimarathon.
- I talked for an hour with cscott about template parsing and a possible new feature regarding talk pages. I repeatedly emphasized the importance of how the community would much rather have years of backlogs worth of technical issues dealt with, compared to radically reinventing features. We also talked a bit about how sometimes people in the community and the WMF don't understand each other that well and some possible sources of that tension (what I refer to as the "Venn diagram situation"). He told me that when the fundraising banners were less manipulative and also less effective last year, they had to lay off 20% of their staff. Apparently, the endowment was created as a buffer, so when people donate less often, the foundation will still be okay.
August 9 – Friday
Sessions
- I attended the Exploiting Wikimedia foundation platforms session, because it sounded fascinating. Unfortunately, I did not find it to actually be that way, and ended up leaving early. It mostly seemed to be about... one editor being upset that Commons did not block a specific person? They suggested a foundation committee needed to be established for this, which confused me. It's possible I didn't understand the importance of what they were trying to get at.
- I attended the Citation Watchlist session after I left the previous one. I learned that the foundation has not given technology grants for awhile, so the project was being supported by Hacks/Hackers. More information about the script can be found on this page.
- I attended the Universities and Wikimedia session from 10:30 to 10:55 am. Some key takeaways were: most Wiki Education efforts have been in North America, targeting faculty and databases; libraries are a vast resource of pay-walled or otherwise hard to access sources, and if 1% of American university students made a contribution, it'd be 150,000 contributions. Then the talk switched to something I had talked about with other people yesterday: Wikipedia clubs! The speaker made the argument that students can write about what they're interested in, which provides a lot of good long-term engagement. One of the downsides, though, is that it can take a lot of work to establish one of these clubs.
- I attended the 10 Years and 20 Million Links Fixed session from 11:00 to 11:25 am. This session was about InternetArchiveBot, and I thought it was really interesting. The foundation does not fund this; that comes from a partnership with the Internet Archive itself.
- I attended the Student Engagement with Openness session from 11:30 to 11:55 am. I thought it was a very interesting success story for what Wikimedian in Residence programs can accomplish. The slides are linked at the session page for others who are curious.
- I attended the Remixing Open Culture session from 3:30 to 4:10 pm. The poster I created can be found here.
Conversations
- Before the sessions started, I had a conversation with other editors. Someone told me about how they attended a wedding of two Wikipedians and the lead section of marriage was read at the ceremony. He also said that there have been people that got married at Wikimania. I also got some advice about how the foundation might offer me a job at some point, because they like "poaching" prominent community members; however, I was warned that this experience can be incredibly frustrating. Another editor, Ragesoss, showed me something called Impact Visualizer, which I thought was a really cool tool. I then talked to central notice admin TheresNoTime about how they improved Wikimedia UK budgets (this affiliate does a lot of GLAM work with museums and libraries). Vermont told me about how they broke temporary accounts during the hackathon: they found a way to give a temporary account sysop rights and the ability to block an admin. It's only possible because they're a steward, but the issue is going to be fixed, regardless. This is also when I found out I now have a Commons category and a Wikidata item.
- While I did not attend this session, I was told that my mobile editing essay was mentioned at the Board of Trustees meeting.
- I had lunch with HJ Mitchell, ToBeFree and Hawkeye7. Then, I got an email from a Foundation employee to tell me that BBC's Tech Life wanted to interview me, so I cut lunch a bit short and headed up to the press room. My interview starts at 20:20. I talked for longer than what was actually included in the interview. For example, I was asked what my favourite article was: it was a question that caught me somewhat off-guard, but I said that it was ketchup chip, due to its novelty. If you tell any Canadian that this article didn't exist until I wrote it this year, they'd be shocked. Anyways, I realized that the article could be in better shape than it was, so I expanded it after I finished the interview. I bought an e-book about the history of Canadian snack food and read portions of it while hanging out with other editors in the hackathon room. I did this for the rest of the day and hung out with editors Chlod, Dreamy Jazz, Novem Linguae, Leaderboard, Harej and Cyberpower678 (I did take a quick break to attend the remixing open culture session linked above).
August 10 – Saturday
Sessions
- I attended the Older vs younger generations session from 10:00 to 10:25 am. There were fancy charts, pie charts, and conclusions, but I believe that the sample size was far too small to do any of that, since all of this was based off a survey where there had been just 28 participants. I talked with DerHexer after the session concluded, and he let me know about an equivalent German Wikipedia survey with more than 1,000 participants. Unfortunately, I don't understand German, but I think that's a more representative sample size than 28.
- I attended the Understanding and assisting with undisclosed paid editing enforcement session from 11:00 to 11:55 am. The speaker was employed by the Foundation's legal department and it was a pre-recorded presentation. Details were limited, because there's only so much that can be shared, but I found what was presented interesting. Key takeaways were that they've taken down 150 domains, have created lines of communication with platforms where UPE scams are provided, and have performed more than 50 informal settlements. He repeatedly thanked the members of the community who offer leads into these investigations, as the team has to focus on the worst offenders due to limited resources.
- I attended The Future of the Wikipedian in Residence Position from 1:30 to 1:55 pm. I admit to being intrigued about the concept of the position itself (it's near the top of the list for my dream job aspirations).
- I attended the closing ceremony, and then the closing party, where I mostly just had conversations with other editors. Someone shared a screenshot of a mobile fundraising project with me, which prompted me to start a thread over at the village pump.
Conversations
- I wanted to watch the Wikipedia and television session, as well, but I got lost trying to find the room, so I gave up and returned to the hackathon to hang out with people again. It was mostly the same group as yesterday, although Samwalton9 also joined us. Whenever I was not attending a session, I was there.
- I had lunch with Pacita (WikiNYC): she's a relatively new editor, and we had a very interesting conversation together, mainly talking about perennial sources, RfA, and sources of tension between the Foundation and community.
- I received a coffee mug and keyboard mouse as a gift from the city of Katowice. The organizers of the conference itself handed these gifts to me and the other Wikimedian of the Year winners.
August 11 – Sunday
I woke up early to check out of the hotel, because my shuttle back to the Katowice Airport would leave at 9 am. It was about a half-hour drive, and I had a fun time talking with several other editors on the bus.
When we arrived at the airport, I said an official goodbye to some editors, and we arranged a group photo where we all showed our passports. However, plenty of us didn't have flights for hours, so we organized an impromptu edit-a-thon in the airport café. I unpacked my backpack to show Kingoflettuce the books I had brought to the conference, and he did start reading one of these books: Jehovah's Witnesses: A New Introduction by George Chryssides. He got about halfway through it, and then we talked a bit about the lack of active editors in the topic area, and how I've been trying to reduce the reliance on primary sources; he told me what he knew about the group's history in Singapore. On a side note, Chlod said that he was going to try to nominate an article for good article status for the first time, so we all encouraged him to go for it!
Finally, I learned a little bit about how Malaysian names worked from Taufik Rosman, and he also told me about the work he does across projects. It was really cool to have an extended conversation with the previous Wikimedian of the Year!
Gallery
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The buildings to the left and right of the conference venue. I coined the term "Lego building" to refer to the latter when giving people directions and it caught on. Someone else coined "UFO" to refer to building on the left. -
The ICC building where Wikimania was held. -
Inside the conference venue. -
Ice cream I bought at the plaza across from my hotel on the first day. -
A selfie with Jimmy Wales. -
Being interviewed by another Wikimedian in front of the hack-a-thon room. -
A selfie with Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight. -
A talented artist creating a representation of Wikimania. -
My spot on the board :) -
The food I ate at the closing party. -
Edit-a-thon at the airport. -
I'm the maple leaf in the top right.
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